


9+ Lives

by FrenchRoast



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Neighbors, Cats, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-18
Updated: 2016-02-18
Packaged: 2018-05-21 12:35:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6051754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchRoast/pseuds/FrenchRoast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the following prompt: Belle moves into a new house and suspects her neighbor may be the stereotypical crazy cat lady because she can see cats sitting in windows every time she passes by. Turns out, Mr. Gold cares for them whenever people dump their unwanted pets on their lonely lane.</p>
            </blockquote>





	9+ Lives

A sweaty and exhausted Belle collapsed onto her couch. The lack of pillows didn’t even register. She was worn out, and she hadn’t even done much of the real heavy lifting. Leroy and Charming were an odd team, but they were worth so much more than what she’d spent to have their services for a few hours.

  
Moving was a bitch. Especially when half of your worldly belongings were books.

  
“I should get a kindle or some kind of e-reader,” she mused. But Belle told herself that all the time. The lure of holding a weighty tome, smelling the fresh—or old, if the book was used—paper, the dog-eared pages giving each book its own history of being read…all of these things were hard for Belle to consciously give up in exchange for a device that could hold all of her books. She worried the words would lack their richness on a backlit e-ink screen. Not to mention the cost. Maybe if she ever got a bonus at work…not that librarians ever got bonuses.

  
The house itself was already a bonus, even though it wasn’t related to her job. She’d had no idea her father owned a home on Rose Lane, not until the executor of his will had handed her the deed along with everything else her father had left her. Belle was thankful he’d left the flower shop to his assistant, Chip something or other. Belle didn’t want to manage a flower shop, and Chip had helped keep that place afloat when her father got distracted with new projects. This house was probably one of them.

  
Belle and her father had never been on the best of terms. It was weird moving into a house he’d owned, but Belle had decided to get over the weirdness, because she could barely afford the rent on her apartment, and it wasn’t as though her father had ever lived in the house. It was completely devoid of furniture and décor when she went to see it after receiving the keys.

  
Belle set to unpacking the boxes that surrounded her as she mulled over the mystery of how her father came to own this house. Mostly, she decided that he must have bought it to flip, since he’d purchased it right before the market tanked. That was exactly the sort of short-sighted, get-rich-quick-doing-something-he-knew-nothing-about scheme her father would latch onto at the worst possible moment.

  
Seeing as she no longer had to pay rent, Belle resolved to try and be a little more grateful to her late father. _And that would be easier to do on a full stomach_ , she thought. The pizzas she’d ordered hours ago were long gone, as Leroy had taken the leftovers to share with his roommates.

  
“Time for Chinese,” Belle said as she whipped out her cellphone.

  
“Mushu’s, where you can have it Yaoguai,” a tired lady’s voice answered. God only knew how many times that poor woman answered the phone like that every day. Belle gave her the order and her new address, got the total, and after hanging up, she realized she had no idea where her purse was. Well, it was somewhere in the house. She started searching, and eventually wound up in the kitchen. As she spotted it lying on the counter, the backyard light popped on. Motion-triggered, of course. Every scenario ran through her head. The sun had set an hour ago. Had she locked all the doors? What about the windows?

  
Before Belle had the chance to get too worked up, she saw the black cat ambling through the backyard. Just someone’s pet. Not a burglar. Maybe a cat burglar, but that was just a nice pun, not something to be scared of.

The light flicked off.

  
She hadn’t even had time to reach into her purse before the light flicked on again. She looked out the kitchen window. Another cat. This one was a silver tabby, and like the black cat, she-or he-was headed in the direction of the large Victorian house next door.

  
_They must belong to my neighbor._ Belle collected the money she needed to pay for her take-out and went to set it by the front door. She placed the money on the side table Charming had left sitting by the front door, but stopped at the view she saw through the glass in the door. She was beginning to see why her father hadn’t sold the house: there were easily fifteen cats of all colors and sizes making their way towards her neighbor’s front porch. Calicos, tabbies, short and long-haired cats. One was missing a tail. The sight was surreal. Belle slipped out onto her own front porch, just in time to catch a glimpse of her neighbor dishing out food, placing it into an assortment of bowls that Belle could’ve sworn weren’t there earlier.

  
She didn’t get a good look at her neighbor other than to see the neighbor had brown hair that came just to her shoulder, and she seemed not much taller than Belle herself. At least, Belle assumed the neighbor was a she.

  
“Oh lord, I’ve moved in next door to Storybrooke’s crazy cat lady,” Belle groaned. It wasn’t going to be horrible—clearly the house next door was kept up well, and the cats seemed to have a regular feeding time. Belle thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but later that evening, well after her Chinese food had been delivered and eaten, the kitties rid her of that illusion. There was yowling. Hissing. Fighting. With some sound-proofing, that wouldn’t be so bad, but what really got to her was the motion sensor being triggered constantly, turning her backyard into an al fresco feline disco. She made it through work the next day (thank god for coffee), and the day after, but by 3am on the third night in her new house, Belle was beyond her breaking point. When the one she’d dubbed “The Squall” started yowling intermittently, something inside Belle snapped. She was ending this now. Threw on her overcoat, stepped into her flip-flops, and stormed over to her next-door neighbor’s front door, where she started to pound on the door, alternating between her fists and the door knocker. She was starting to get into a rhythm when the door pulled away from her, and suddenly she was facing her neighbor.

  
Her neighbor was not a crazy cat lady, _he_ was a crazy cat dude. A sexy crazy cat dude, even sleepy and stubbly. If she’d been less sleep-deprived, Belle would have had enough wherewithal to not blurt out “I don’t care how hot you are, I’m sick of listening to your damn kitty carnival!”

  
But Belle _was_ really tired and her ability to filter was long-gone, so that was _exactly_ what she said.

  
“I’m sorry,” he apologized. Then “who are you?”

  
“Your next-door-neighbor.” Belle decided to pretend she hadn’t said the part about him being hot. It was just a slip of the tongue. Like she kinda wanted to give him.

  
“But no one lives next door.” His brown hair was a bit tousled. Very sexy. It didn’t hurt that he was only in pajama pants.

  
_Focus, woman._

  
“I do now,” she said stiffly. “I’m Belle. And this is the third night I haven’t gotten any sleep.”

  
“I’m Rumpl—Mr. Gold,” he corrected. No need for her to know about his crazy first name when she already thought he was crazy. “I’ll do what I can about the cats, but they can’t all stay inside.” He looked around his porch, worried. “I’ll do my best,” he promised.

  
“Just shut them up so I can sleep. They keep wandering through my bedroom—I mean, backyard—and it triggers the motion sensors and they’re yowling. I like cats, but these—it’s too much. I can’t sleep.” Belle plopped down on the bench that hung from the ceiling of the porch. “How’d you end up with all these cats?” She yawned. “Break into the animal shelter?”

  
Mr. Gold shook his head. “No. It’s just that this is a nice neighborhood, and I’ve got that wooded lot on the other side of the house. People don’t realize what they’re getting into when they adopt a cat sometimes, or they decided to punish their child by taking it away. They drop them off in the abandoned lot and drive off, even as the poor cat or kitten cries, not knowing why it’s been left behind.”

  
“But..but that’s horrible. How can people do that? With a pet?”

  
“Most people think cats can fend for themselves, and they can, but pet cats are used to people, and they need us almost as much as we need them, even if they don’t seem to. Some people just don’t care. Others are simply cruel. I can’t stand to let any creature be abandoned like that. So they’ve become mine.” He picked up a fluffy white cat winding around his legs. Even from several feet away, Belle could hear the cat’s rumbling purr.

  
“You can’t find new homes for them?”

  
“Dogs and kittens I can find homes for, but there are just too many cats. I make sure they’re fixed, and that they get their shots and I feed them. Brush the long-haired ones. Play with them when I can. Make sure they know they’re loved.”

  
Belle nodded at this, and yawned again. “Now I’m sorry. Here I was, thinking you were just some crazy cat lady, collecting cats for no reason.” She drew herself up on the bench, facing sideways, feet tucked under her knees, and rested her head against the back of bench. Just for a moment.

  
“An understandable assumption,” he said, putting down the white cat and picking up an orange tabby. “Aside from the lady part, at least. But I will see what I can do about keeping the louder ones inside. Pavarotti and Maria Callas can really caterwaul sometimes, can’t you, Pavarotti?” he asked, holding the orange tabby up and twirling him a bit before pulling the cat back in to scratch between the ears. “If I’d known I had a new neighbor, I’d have already tried.” Pavarotti squirmed out of Mr. Gold’s arms, and only then did he notice that Belle had fallen asleep on the porch bench while he was occupied with Pavarotti.

  
After Belle’s complaints about not getting any sleep, he decided it would be best not to wake her. He ushered inside as many cats as he could, including Pavarotti, and then reemerged from the house with a throw-sized cotton quilt, and laid it on top of her; she didn’t stir. Being summer in Maine, it wasn’t too cold out that night, but he didn’t want her to catch a chill. Tomorrow, they could hash out a solution to the cats.

Maybe after that, they could discuss the part about him being hot. That was most intriguing.


End file.
